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Sept.
2002 |
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Have a newsworthy item? Comments? Questions? Contact Paula Byrne, editor |
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Technical Questions or Comments? Contact Rick Paula, Technical Editor
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Karen Smith
Years ago when I was playing “library” and lending books back and forth with my best friend and next-door neighbor, I had no idea of what I would be doing in the future. In fact, when I finished college, I still had no firm plans for a career. I majored in psychology and followed the liberal arts track taking everything from astronomy and Italian to logic and Japanese history purely for personal interest. It was more than ten years before I decided that what I wanted to do more than anything was become a school librarian.
I didn’t imagine that technology would play a huge role in the field at that time. However, during my teacher training, I was becoming very involved with technology in schools through first volunteering at my children’s schools, then working as a computer teacher at a parochial school, then as a paraprofessional running a Mac lab and maintaining Apple IIe’s, while trying to encourage classroom teachers to utilize them.
During the next three years, as a library aide, I discovered how much I enjoyed finding just the right resources for students, teachers and administrators. In the 80’s and 90’s the Internet was evolving from text-based Unix to the user-friendly World Wide Web. It had been very difficult for lay people to use. One of my earliest Internet experiences was when my husband I first went online and were trying to read the news and put in the wrong command. The next line said, “You are trying to edit the news. This is not allowed.” We clearly had much to learn. The evolution of the World Wide Web helped us greatly.
I was fascinated by the possibilities of the web, which was much easier to navigate and started writing down educationally useful URLs in an address book. At the end of the 90’s, I entered graduate school, and was busily bookmarking the many web sites that I was hearing about from colleagues, other grad students, and professors in my program as well as on listservs such as LM-NET, WWWEDU and in journals. My collection quickly grew and so I organized them into folders but felt frustration that they could not be accessed and shared with teachers unless I went home and looked them up on my own computer.
I then learned about Blink It and other web services that would allow one to upload one’s bookmarks to the web and be able to access them from any computer connected to the Internet. This was useful but slow, needed my password and then they started charging money. At this point, I was assigned by my professor to design a web page for my school library media program. What to do? We already had a great one designed by my job share partner.
After thinking about it, I realized that here was the solution finally to put all of these bookmarks to work. I would organize them around my district’s official curriculum and then they could be available to all of the media specialists, classroom teachers, students, and parents, town-wide. It quickly grew from two pages to twenty-one and then became unwieldy, with too many sites to look through so I added a search engine and broke down the major areas into webquests, lessons or topical categories. The search engine is primarily for educators outside of my system who might have a similar curriculum but at different grade levels.
I am not artistic or even particularly technologically savvy and the site will probably never use Flash or look very glitzy but my purpose is to keep it simple so that visitors will get to the information faster and that it will just be a “thruway on the information highway” as opposed to a destination. All library teachers can do this by collecting the sites that they already use and putting them on an html page and finding a server to upload to, preferably on their school district’s, if available. It is really very simple but will be very useful both in their program and for providing resources. I believe that, now that the Internet is much more stable and dependable and more schools have networked and wireless computers, its role will grow in schools to a great extent and library teachers are the leaders in showing how it can be used as a tool.
To my delight, Education World found my site, interviewed me and published a short article in September. It is very affirming to have my website recognized by them and by publishing the address more educators will know about it. That is the best impetus for keeping it current-knowing that it is being utilized. Now, if the Mass D.O.E. would just finish my paperwork and certify me………